By RAY CAVANAUGH
It sounds too extreme to be true. But such a murder indeed took place on August 11, 1921, when Fr. James Coyle, a pastor of the Cathedral of St. Paul in Birmingham, Ala., was gunned down by Rev. Edwin Roscoe Stephenson, a Southern Methodist Episcopal minister and Ku Klux Klan member who was irate that Fr. Coyle had married his 18-year-old daughter to a Puerto Rican man.
Coyle — who was born in Ireland’s County Roscommon in 1873 — received a Jesuit education in Ireland and later headed to Rome, where he attended the Pontifical North American College. Soon after his priestly Ordination on May 30, 1896, he sailed to Alabama. There he served as an instructor and, later, a rector at the McGill Institute for Boys in Mobile. And in 1904, he became the pastor of the Cathedral of St. Paul in Birmingham.
The Irish priest arrived in Birmingham “shortly before a wave of anti-Catholicism flooded the country,” according to a March 2010 article in Columbia Magazine. He became very vocal at speaking out against anti-Catholic prejudice, and this assertiveness had put him on the radar of some dangerous people. Federal agents had warned the diocese that Coyle’s life was at risk and that his church was a potential target for arson. Neither of these prospects did much to quiet him.
For 17 years he fulfilled his priestly duties, unaware that the most serious threat to his safety would come from very nearby: The Stephenson family lived just one block away from St. Paul’s Cathedral. The head of the household, Edwin Roscoe Stephenson, worked as both a barber and a minister. The Catholic Weekly newspaper described him as “a rather furtive figure,” known as the “marrying parson,” due to his “practice of marrying run-away couples while he hung around the courthouse.” He was also an ardent Klansman.
Stephenson’s only child who survived infancy was his daughter Ruth — an intelligent, inquisitive young woman who was growing restless under the unceasingly bigoted constraints of her father’s household. In fact, he kept bashing Catholicism so much that she began to take interest in it. She would visit the nearby cathedral, sometimes speaking with Fr. Coyle. Eventually, she converted and secretly became engaged to another Catholic, a Puerto Rican man named Pedro Gussman.
On August 11, 1921, Fr. Coyle performed a surreptitious wedding ceremony for the couple. Somehow, though, word of the wedding spread, because only about one hour after the wedding, Rev. Stephenson ambushed the priest on the porch of St. Paul’s rectory and shot him three times with a handgun.
Many people heard the shots, but there were reportedly no eyewitnesses. Stephenson immediately surrendered himself to the authorities.
A September 1921 Catholic Monthly article says how, within seven minutes of the shooting, Fr. Coyle was brought to St. Vincent’s hospital where, “The finest medical skill of the city was at his service almost instantly, but he lived only long enough to receive the Final Sacrament of the Church.” While Coyle’s body rested in a casket at St. Paul Cathedral, thousands of people came to pay their respects.
In the aftermath of this killing, the local atmosphere was so volatile that the young bride, Ruth Stephenson, had left town. Eventually located in Tennessee, she agreed to return to Birmingham, but no hotels or rooming houses were willing to risk having her as a guest, so she had to stay at the home of a Catholic family who kept her presence a secret. During the trial, which lasted one week, she appeared in the courtroom but neither side ever called her to testify. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference: After all, the trial was rigged.
The Ku Klux Klan financed Stephenson’s defense, which consisted of a team of lawyers who were Klansmen (the head of this high-powered defense team was Hugo Black, who later renounced the Klan and became a Supreme Court Justice). It undoubtedly didn’t hurt their cause that the presiding judge was a Klansman, too. As there was no question that Stephenson was the man behind the trigger, the defense claimed that he had killed while in a state of “temporary insanity.”
As many had expected, Stephenson was acquitted. Though the verdict reinforced the ominous message that the Klan could kill with impunity, much of the public, including non-Catholics, were repelled by the whole matter.
As The Catholic Weekly stated years later, Fr. Coyle’s slaying was “the climax of the anti-Catholic feeling in Alabama,” and afterwards, “slowly and almost unnoticeably the Ku Klux Klan and their ilk began to lose favor among the people.”
For all the drama surrounding their matrimony, Ruth and Mr. Gussman split up in less than one week. She ultimately died of tuberculosis a decade later, having relocated to Chicago and remarried. Three years after her death, Gussman died in an unsolved hit-and-run car accident which took place, eerily enough, in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Outliving them all was Stephenson, the trigger man. Decades after his acquittal, he was known to hang around the courthouse, as he was still offering his services to marry couples for a fee. By then, however, he was largely a figure of disdain and most everyone ignored him until his death in 1956 at age 86.
The Coyle murder and subsequent trial had made major national headlines in 1921 but soon after largely faded from memory, at least outside Alabama. As the years passed, there would surface an occasional article on the case, typically on the murder’s anniversary.
In the year 2010, however, the case received the attention of a full-length book, with the publication of Sharon Davies’ Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion in America.
On August 11 of this year, at 12:10 p.m., Birmingham’s Cathedral of St. Paul will hold a 100th anniversary Mass to celebrate the life and legacy of Fr. Coyle. EWTN will carry a live broadcast.
Additionally, a local Birmingham film maker is producing a documentary, Father James Coyle: Life and Legacy.
Those seeking further information should visit the website www.fathercoyle.org.
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